I know one or two people who are able to dream lucidly, often experiencing Out of Body Experiences (OOBEs), more or less whenever they want to. For most of us, though, lucid dreams are something that we can only imagine. A couple of guys from Brooklyn are about to change all that, though, having successfully raised over half a million dollars via the Kickstarter crowd funding platform to create the Remee Mask. Here they explain what it is:

Scott Smith writes at Current Intelligence: Identifying alleged troublemakers is no longer just the job of the faceless men and women in dark operations rooms. The riots also made facial recognition more…

I got an early Christmas present last year: a package from Los Angeles cartoonist Mike Jasorka. Inside was the fruit of his efforts and my $20 Kickstarter pledge: December 3rd 1967: An Alien Encounter, a graphic novelisation of the strange case of Herbert Schirmer, a Nebraska state patrolman who claims to have been taken aboard an alien spacecraft.

I commend it to all wrong-thinking disinfonauts everywhere, for several reasons, but mostly aesthetic. The black and white panels occasionally splashed with dramatic colour ensures that the 50+ page book is a visually compelling artefact.

It also arrives with a CD, a word for word adaptation from the found audio of Schirmer at a 1970’s UFO conference in Florida, making it simultaneously an aural event (surely a first for a graphic novel, but fanboys will no doubt correct me). Finally, there’s the story: of Schirmer’s childhood upbringing that leads him to become a police officer, what happened that very night on duty and why even after countless ridicule, he stuck next to the unbelievable truth. Herbert’s heart-felt story speaks of his childhood upbringing that leads him to become a police officer, what happened that very night on duty and why even after countless ridicule, he stuck next to the unbelievable truth …

There’s a glaring but very funny mistake in Amazon’s free digital edition of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. The first paragraph adds the word “tush” (instead of “tusk”) to the poem “Night song of the Jungle.” In the poem “tush” now becomes part of the “hour of pride and power.”

More than four years later, Google now finds over 2,500 sites quoting the “tush” version of Kipling’s poem, including several universities and even the Encyclopedia Britannica! A misguided human resources document even quoted the “tush” version of the poem – then added it “could very well be a guide in defining and understanding organizations.” Tush-friendly organizations are described by the HR document as places that include “unwritten codes and culture,” and adhering to them “determines one’s chances of survival…”

But the typo ultimately proves the value of “crowdsourcing,” since the free etext has recently become one of Amazon’s best-selling ebooks, which is what led to the discovery of the typo, in a kind of “spontaneous collaboration” which will help preserve a story that was written more than 100 years ago.

Alex Lightman was the CTO for the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Renewable Energy Organization. Now he compares the NASA Mission Control room to Caesars Palace Race and Sports Book, and asks whether we…